Libby Likely, Rove Unclear
From the New York Times:
Lawyers in the C.I.A. leak case said Thursday that they expected I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, to be indicted on Friday, charged with making false statements to the grand jury.
Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, will not be charged on Friday, but will remain under investigation, people briefed officially about the case said. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration on Friday.
The Wall Street Journal reports the same thing.
My prediction? After Libby resigns, Cheney will be pressured to take a fall. Why?
1) The sudden resurgence of damning articles and columns about legal intransigence and cabalistic behavior coming out of the Vice President's "Gestapo office."
2) The Cheney-as-werewolf meme, propagated by old-timey anti-war critic Brent Scowcroft:
"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend—I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."
Which channels Colin Powell:
Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Hussein.
3) The new (to me) storyline of Bush finally losing patience with ol' Big Time, especially as reported by scooptastic Beltway insider Liz Smith:
[Only days ago], everyone was preoccupied with reporter Bob Woodward's theory that Vice President Dick Cheney would decide to run for president in 2008. (Mrs. Cheney denied this to Newsweek [sic] just this week.) But this week, the talkers and rumormongers are saying that regardless of the fate of Karl Rove or Scooter Libby (aides to the president and vice president respectively)—it is Dick Cheney who will take the fall—and resign from office over it.
The other part of the tale has the president and vice president very much "on the outs."
4) The aforementioned Woodward, who for some reason has been trying to scare people about the unlikely prospect of Cheney 2008 since May, has been giving increasingly ominous-sounding lectures about the "secret government":
The big worry that we should have about the country is not terrorism or hurricanes or Karl Rove or George Bush or whoever, the real thing that will bring us down as a country is secret government.
Hmmm, not Rove, not even Bush…. I wonder who exactly is running that dreaded, worse-than-the-threat-of-terrorism secret government? And before you dismiss Woodward's Cheney vs. Bush semantics as the wishful thinking of some damned MSMer, ask yourself how many recent Republican presidents have managed much of a second term after the old Naval Intelligence hand punished them for leaning too hard on the FBI and CIA?
Dumping the entire Fitzgerald mess on Libby's lap without splashing at least some of the dirt on Cheney seems improbable at best. The spook agencies—a source of independent government power in their own right—are smelling blood in the water. And an increasingly despised White House needs someone else to blame for all the other bummers coming home to roost. With the usual caveat that all my political predictions turn out wrong, here's two cents you can take to the bank: Cheney's a goner by 2006.
